Kubernetes for Network Engineers#

Egbert Verhage (NIT Solutions)

• Why: For the PM this is mostly foundational, but it is a well-structured, demo-driven (asciinema recordings) walkthrough of exactly the K8s networking primitives in their interest area — CNI choice, MetalLB and Cilium BGP announcements, IPAM (pod/service CIDRs, Whereabouts), and Multus/SR-IOV — useful as enablement/reference material for network teams they work with.
• What: A bottom-up tour of Kubernetes networking aimed at network engineers: pods and their disposable IPs, Services (ClusterIP/LoadBalancer/NodePort), namespaces (explicitly not a network boundary), pod-CIDR vs. service-CIDR, flannel as a first CNI, then progressively more network-y builds: MetalLB for bare-metal LoadBalancer services, swapping to Cilium to announce pod pools and LoadBalancer IPs over BGP without node masquerade, and Multus to attach extra interfaces (e.g., macvlan) to pods. Brief pointers to KubeVirt, Rook, SR-IOV CNI, and Whereabouts IPAM.
• How: Live demos via asciinema casts: deploy flannel, apply an IP pool with MetalLB, then configure ciliumbgpadvertisements.cilium.io CRDs to originate BGP for pod and service prefixes, and Multus for multi-interface pods.
• Where applicable: Broadly applicable — vanilla kubeadm clusters, no specific vendor platform. Introductory level: for someone already working on Cilium/K8s networking daily this covers familiar ground, with the Cilium-BGP and Multus demos being the most transferable bits.